ah, well almelexia's done but u might wanna tweak her abit

If you need someone to retexture the new Almelexia (while staying true to the look of the original but in High-rez), then I would be delighted to help out there; sixy Almelexy Mark II .

Great! :thumbsup: Best. Mod. Name. Ever.

_{(when it's spelt right)}

Derived from the Todd Howard quote, "Best. mod. ever.".

Good ol' Todd, your awesome.

Just looking at the work Lidicus as done, includes some things you haven't seen yet. Amazing work.

A brief summary of new stuff:
A Better Body Almelexia - looks great, I'll attempt a higher res texture as the tatoos are a bit blurry (not sure if that was same in vanilla)
A Sload matching the concept art exactly! - It's based on the Ogrim animations - Needs texturing.
A new model for the Slaughtershark


Then there will also be the following added to Creatures which you may have seen screenies for
Cave Troll
Daedrok
Raptor
The two Tribunal fabricant creatures now fully fleshed (hulk and verminous)
Bugbear


Lidicus has also updated some existing Creatures meshes, I'll need to extract all the files from the BSA he has sent me to investigate further.

I'm going to investigate the various cave systems in MW and locate the ones that look untouched by daedra or human, and replace existing spawn points with special animal spawn points (Bugbear, Cave Trolls, low chance of Tribunal Goblins, Nixes, etc, etc). This will match the Oblivion Mythical method.

The Raptor will appear in Grazelands and Westgash and I'll try and script it so that they will hunt Guars (save the babies!)
The Hulk and Verminous will also have a low chance of appearing in Grazelands, Westgash and perhaps a couple of other areas. They will be weaker then Sotha Sils "improvements"
The Daedroks will be placed in the same levelled lists as Mudcrabs, so most should appear around coastlines. They will have similar stats to their Bloodmoon counterparts, but I'll attempt to script them to attack Slaughterfish
Sload will be added to the new Necromancer Levelled lists I made and I'll see if I can make them behave cowardly and summon an army of undead to save their ugly hides.

Plus I'm going to look at the new Atronaches made by Melchior Dahrk, some of them may make an appearance too.

I may have to make new unique lists to replace existing spawn points to limit creatures to specific regions (while there are specific lists in MW, Beth have used those lists in other regions too).


This will be definately a big update to Creatures, looks like there will be 10+ new creatures to encounter, with hopefully a bit of minor interaction going on too.
Not all of them will be going into Creatures (just due to my own personal strict design code) but there's nothing stopping you from downloading the mods seperately and plug them in too (I know many people do).



Just wondering, should I now make Creatures an ESM? It's become quite an overhaul of MW's creature/list system and it may help resolve conflicts. Can anyone more experienced them me shed any light on this?

How about my Solstheim Guar stuff? It's pretty much done, all I need to do is finish editing the meshes, I can PM you the stuff after.

EDIT: Ok, I'm done it now, I can PM you the meshes if you want.

WOHO! Sload! I love you PirateLord!

How will the Sload act and be encountered? Like we discussed the last time we tried with the Sload?

Cant wait for this!

What's different about the mesh? The pic just indicates a different texture. But sure I'll include them





As mentioned, I'll add it to the Necromancer lists I made (Necromancers have a chance of appearing in Tombs), and then I'll try getting it to summon some minions while using some spells, then if it's health is low try and get it to cast a "Recall" spell. When health is below a certain amount, cast on itself a spell every second for 5 seconds for a visual effect and then have it vanish.
It'll most likely summon 3 more "powerful" undead minions, and have a short duration summon skeleton spell which it can keep casting in between it's other ranged attacks.

That's all that's different, the new mesh has the new textures applied, the old one doesn't, I've also included a Guar tarp and Guar Screen for the Solstheim Guar.

I'll PM it to you then, just gotta zip and upload it.

Wow - this sounds like another great update to an already great mod! Special thanks to the individual creature makers.


In my tests I haven't found esms to behave any different from esps, except that they load earlier, which might be undesirable for a mod that should not have its objects merged. (FWIW, I put Creatures into merged_objects and see no problems at all, but anyway - the current standing recommendation is to not include it, and that means that it's probably better if Creatures loads pretty late, so turning it into an esm would be counter-productive).

In Pre-MCP times, one of the incentives for turning a mod into an esm was that esm didn't cause (as much) doubling. The reason for this was that Morowind was often able to re-match esms correctly when the load order had changed, but not esps. The Morrowind Code Patch fixes this, so esms have no advantage over esps in that regard.

I've also seen many claims that "esms cannot change esms", but my tests indicate otherwise.

Personally, I suspect that the Morrowind engine, after having been fixed with the MCP, handles esms and esps almost identically. If that's correct, then the only advantage of turning a mod into an esm would be that other mods can be made dependent on it in the construction set, so that they can change references added by your mod without doubling them. And even that is perhaps just a limit of the construction set, not of the game engine (it may be possible to achieve the same effect by adding an esp as another mod's master, but I haven't tested this).

So, in short: If your mod adds many new *references* (not objects) that other mods may want to modify, then turning it ointo an esm might be a good idea. Otherwise it might be counter-productive since it would cause Creatures to load much earlier, making it more susceptible for overrides.

That sounds really sweet PirateLord!

Sounds just like a Sload.

Any estimated time period until it's release?

Just sent you the Solstheim Guar, it's textures are nice and high res, I didn't see it ingame yet, but if there's anything wrong with how it looks just tell me and I'll fix it up.

Thanks Psy. I won't worry about that.

Sounds like MCP has also fixed the problem where Merge Objects causes strange things to happen with the scripts. If so, that's great news.


Thanks SWG


Ald, it'll be ready when it's ready Think of a date, add the number of days the same as your year of birth, minus the number of moonsugar in your game, multiply by a number I'm thinking off and ignore the result

Ha ha nice calculation.

Anyway awesome great news this!

sload! yay!

Is the Sload one of those that isn't going to be in? I can imagine that it would be hard to find a good reason for having Sloads around somewhere...

I can see if the Sload would be in the Boss Encounters somehow, but I'm not sure if it fits in there since they dont tend to have a interest in Items of Legend but more or less just dark and "wet, smelly" places with water nearby.

sload are suppose to be very slow, calculating, and cowardly... on land. in the water they are quite mobile and fast, though still cowardly and slow to decisions.

they should harbour some deadly diseases

As well as those already mentioned, there're number of other new creatures that've been released since Creatures X. The ones I'm aware of: CaptainZaltan's assortment, MidgetAlien's and DemonXen's NIFSkope creations, Quorn's ash poet, Arcimaestro Antares's replacement Advanced Steam Centurion (that'd make a grand new creature, IMHO) and Wildman's skeleton additions.

Have you had a chance to check all these out, PirateLord?

i'd like the link to those if you have them? or at least some screenshots?

It was my understanding that with an spawn point of master file a plugin could move that spawn point and the result would be the creature/npc spawns at the new location. By comparison with a plugin if you move a spawn point with another plug-in you get two spawn points - the original and the moved spawns. If that's not true then making a .esm wouldn't make sense. But if it is then making Creatures XI a .esm would allow a mod to move a cliffer racer spawn point out of a modded town. Maybe the MCP changed things.

That's correct and still valid. It's what I meant with my last paragraph - if Creatures adds a lot of *references* that other mods might want to change, then turning it into an esm makes sense, because esps can't modify references added by other esps, it causes doubling. Spawn points are references - I hadn't thought about those, and that may indeed be something that other plugins may want to move. For example, if Creatures places a monster spawnpoint right where a modder placed his settlement, then this modder may want to make a compatibility plugin to move that spawnpoint away. That's easy if Creatures is an esm, but much more involved (if at all possible) if it is an esp. Good point.

(TechnoRamble: Although, I still suspect the whole "esps can't modify esps" thing is *not* a limitation of the engine, but one of the contruction set. The construction set never includes esps in the list of a mod's dependencies, therefore, if my mod tries to change a reference from another esp, the changed reference gets saved to my mod with modindex 0. Which means that the game will treat it as a new reference originating from my mod. I suspect that if I hacked the esp from which the reference originated into the list of my plugin's dependencies, and gave the changed reference the according mod- and objectindex, the engine would handle this just as if the original esp had been an esm. But that's largely academical at this point, although it would open up interesting possibilities for esps patching other esps.)

Thanks for the clarification, psyringe. So, as to the original question: Yes Creatures XI should be released as a .esm.

By the same token MCA would greatly benifit from being made a master. NoM would benifit from being a hybrid with all the references and objects in a .esm but having blank scripts and the scripts being in a seperate, future-dated .esp so that the vendors/wells/buildings and so forth could be shifted while still allowing other mods to add new references without the need of copying (& potentially fouling) the scripts.

I'd like to see some "unkillable" horror bosses that get up after you kill them and chase you through dungeons. It'd make some of the Dunmer strongholds and stuff even more scary than they already are. Of course, they should probably be melee only and relatively slow.

Would it be possible to prevent the player from being able to loot mummies when they can still rise? Right now you can loot mummies several times because of that, or dispose of their corpse to prevent it from rising again.